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There's good news for those who have embraced social media. It seems Google
feels that the elements on blogs and social network sites like MySpace should be
ranked as relevant. The language of this particular guideline is geared more
towards individuals, though companies can encourage their employees to utilize
sites like LinkedIn to gain further visibility in search results. This may also
help with online reputation management if it pushes third party sites and
reviews down further in the results.
E-tailers will also want to take
note of guidelines for how raters consider commerce sites. Shopping carts,
return policies, shipping calculators, and gift registries are among the
features raters should look for when rating a site as relevant. This is to
distinguish e-commerce from "thin affiliates."
Thin affiliates are
considered to be sites that offer no value to visitors. They simply contain
links to merchants where they can then purchase a product advertised by the thin
affiliate. This is deemed spam in the rater's guidelines. However, affiliate
sites that offer reviews, price comparisons or some other value-add to featured
products or services are ok.
Though, Philipp Lenssen points out parked
domains are met with a bit of "do as I say and not as I do" philosophy. While
the guidelines mark parked domains as spam, Google maintains its DomainPark
program, which allows domain owners to slap a page full of Adsense on their
sites.
The updated version of the standards was released in April 2007,
which preceded a heightened effort by Google to crack down on paid
links.
Source: www.webhostdir.com 
